Boring, boring week. I like boring; it means I get to sleep. I can't believe so much of my summer is gone.. it's like.. one week of frantically running back and forth from school after exams, three weeks of dysfunctional family in Hong Kong, and now it's August. Blah. Strong urge to call up Alex and leave a message on his answering machine with my Carmina Burana mp3 playing in the background, while saying in a very deep voice something like, "The time is now... as the forces of evil converge on your answering machine, there is yet one hope for the world.." Or, I considered playing the T-Rex and raptor sound effects and yelling, "Alex, help me!!!! My house has been overrun with Puffy's genetic experiments gone wrong!!!!" I wouldn't have the guts to do it though.

Read "Interesting Times," with a special feature called "Rincewind being chased by enraged sumo wrestlers and a Peking opera-singing, kung fu fighting woman shouting Communist slogans." That's Terry Pratchett for you.

Lord Hong is so badass.

Read "Men at Arms," which is possibly the best Discworld book. Some discrepancies with Fifth Elephant regarding werewolves though. Also, a special feature called Captain Carrot Gets Laid. Finally. Was hoping to read "Thief of Time," seeing as that Hong Kong is the perfect place to read a book mocking kung fu flicks, but the English section of my local library didn't have it. Had lots of Eddings though. And Madame Bovary. Grrrr. Begone, summer reading! So many books, so little Pratchett... man, and Hong Kong calls itself a British Crown Colony?

Oh, wait.

"Small Gods" was really good. Go Terry Pratchett. I was sort of afraid that a book without the Ankh-Morpork Watch would be stupid, like "Color of Magic", but it was great. The philosophical in-jokes rocked. Shadow puppets in the Allegory of the Cave!

"Soul Music" is really good. It makes me wanna Get Up And Dance, as the song goes. WHAUM WHAUM WHAUM!!!!!! Boom-bambam-boom BOOM! Music with rocks in it! Just to prove Malex wrong, if you want to look for a book that can express the emotion of music in text form, there we go. HELLOOOOO, ANKH-MORPORK!!!!! TERRY PRATCHETT, SIGN MY BOOOOBSSS!!!! hmm. I don't think he'd appreciate that. Could I get people to pay me to not ask them to sign my boobs? Sort of like how Ranwa has a shirt that says "give me a dollar and I'll go away"? Maybe I could send PTerry and photo of, say, Jenna Jameson's boobage and have him sign that.

Susan's a better character now. I was sorta scared she'd be like.. a teenage Dagny Taggart. Characters are sorta weak.. , no, not really, I just don't like them as much as the Watch. damn good music though. Expecting my Vetinari-poo to be thrown in mosh pit anytime now. Know it won't happen, because he's The Patrician. But I so want to see him with his hair down. Pratchett makes a Far Side reference. I'm happy.

Terry Pratchett has such a funny accent. Not A Cannabis Cake.

Finished Feet of Clay. Believe I said this already. Disturbing phenomena yesterday. Pratchett describes Carrot being shot through the hand with a crossbow, my left palm starts hurting like hell, only lessens when I dig into it with my fingernails, and after I go to sleep. Felt better this morning, doesn't hurt now. It's a condition with me or something. Describe a piercing injury through the palm in fiction (which happens more often than you think) and my palm hurts. Believe it's called "cognitive--..." uh something or other but it's cuz cognition is closely related to emotion, which can mainfest itself physically or something. Aw whatever. I used to, when I was little, think it was because Jesus didn't want me to forget his crucifiction, which is why I couldn't stand the sight of it and it hurt me. I also have a deathly fear of impalation. Fencing has helped a bit. Only when I stand still when people are doing drills and have to *wait* for people to drive three feet of metal into my chest, that's not very pleasant. I used to think that impaling someone would be rather graceful, sort of like cutting butter, and feel like a quick stab of pain through your body before you die, but now I think it'd be more painful because meat and bone and whatnot has got resistance, and if you're driving this long piece of metal through it, that'd probably require a bit of.. twisting and serating and tearing, even if the actual stabbing would probably be quick. The process is probably quite painful. And you wouldn't die instantly you'd have to wait to bleed to death.

I'm wondering about the nature of Carrot's injuries, depending on what type of crossbow Pratchett was talking about. Eddings seems to describe crossbow bolts as actual metal bolts, which, if something like that hit Carrot in the palm would probably smash all his hand bones and turn it into a bloody pulp. But Pratchett's crossbow bolts seem more like normal arrows. But if that were so then the arrow would probably punch *through* Carrot's hand, ew. And Pratchett doesn't describe him actually pulling the arrow out but next thing you know he's fighting like nothing happened to him, which was very weird in my mind because I imagined Carrot fighting with this bigass arrow still like sticking out of his hand. He doesn't even go for medical attention after the fight. Pratchett must've just forgot about it. Hmm. But the pain in my palm is more like a pricking like someone stuck a compass in it, not like someone smashed my hand with an iron bar, so that must be it. Arrow it is. Damn, hurts again. Knew I shouldn't have started writing about it.

Spent all afternoon looking at oil paintings. Oooh, here's a good one! Cleopatra Testing Poisons on Condemned Prisoners.

And reading Guards!Guards! in between loading times. Slow computer. Stoopid. *bap*. My poor Vetinari-poo. This book just makes him a normal, garden variety evil. You know, with black robes and everything. Shame. The good thing about him in Jingo and 5th Elephant was that he was there, but not. You know, like, neutral conniving dude that ran the city but didn't make it clear. But this is an earlier book. It's sort of odd to see all the characters de-evolved, like the literary equivalent of those pictures in textbooks where there's this walking monkey that slowly turns into a walking naked guy, with his dick cleverly concealed by his forward leg. But in reverse.

Oh, and apparently, Vetinari *isn't* married, even though he looks like a bondage freak. Um. Terry Pratchett's words, not mine. "Nothing wrong with whips and needles, in moderation" Good God, is it 4:30 already?

"Jingo" has disturbed me. In a good way. Thanks, Nick. No, seriously. I needed that.

Peace on Earth.

My long, semi-philosophical AIM discussion about Pratchett and fictional violence, and responses to it on a message board. I'm Troop. The person with the big "Vetinari for President" graphic.

All alone.. without my Terry Pratchett... good thing I have my... calculus...

bah.

neeed... moreeeee.. disssscwwwooorlllld... Whaddya wanna bet Nick is gonna forget "Jingo" tomorrow? I should remind him. Loudly. Wolfgang is kinda cute. In a deranged homicidal werewolf type way. Yes, I finished "Fifth Elephant", which actually has nothing to do with an elephant. Watch me flunk my math test tomorrow too. Too many tests. It's not that I don't care, it's just that it wouldn't surprise me. BTW, yes, frictional coefficient is 2.3. They should have something for books called a "fictional coefficient" represented by the made up Greek letter "Moo", the amount by which disbelief is suspended. If it's 0, the thing slides right down. If it's.. say.. 2.3, disbelief is not only not suspended, it plummets through the center of the earth and out the other side. It's not a measurement of how outlandish a book is, just how well the writer can carry it off. Like, Discworld is fine, despite it hurting my head whenever I think of a world without a horizon. But some novels really push it... "Look! A giant ferret falls out the sky and rips the villain to shreds!" (I swear to God I'm not making this up) ... "Look! My wand has a never-before-mentioned unique quality of creating beams of golden light when the Bad Guy comes!" Fictional coefficient times the mass of the book = the amount of force needed to get me to read the damn thing.

DISCWORLD! DISCWORLD! Gosh that's fun to say! DISCWORLD!